Wild at Heart

Published in 1997, the romance novel Wild at Heart by Patricia Gaffney takes as its premise the concept of a man raised alone in the wilderness – think Tarzan or Mowgli – and transports it to end of the nineteenth-century Midwest. The novel follows the relationship that blooms between a young widow who has returned to her childhood home and a man discovered living in the woods by her father, a prominent anthropologist. In the course of rediscovering the humanity of a man who grew up surrounded by animals, the young woman finds herself unable to resist his honest and guileless charms.

Sydney Darrow’s husband died eighteen months ago after a year of marriage. Although their relationship was loving, and he was a kind man, their life lacked the kind of passion that Sydney has sometimes dreamed about. As the novel opens on the year 1893, Sydney returns to her family home in Michigan, where she will live with her father, two brothers, and an aunt.

When Sydney returns, she falls back into her old pattern of trying to please her family and looking for the approval of her father, Dr. Harley Winter, who always had more time for his scientific experiments than for his children. She is also stymied by her stern aunt Estelle, her father’s sister, who became the woman of the house after the death of Sydney’s mother.



Dr. Winter is a gifted anthropologist who has just made a startling discovery: he, his assistant Charles, and Sydney’s older brother, Philip, have discovered and captured “Ontario Man,” a young man who was lost in the woods before he was ten years old and has spent two decades living on his own among wolves in the Canadian wilderness. The young man doesn’t speak and seems to be feral, so he is the perfect test case for Dr. Winter’s theories about the altruistic tendencies which humans and other animals possess. Is the decision to suffer on behalf of someone else learned behavior or intrinsic?

Sydney is shocked that her father has been keeping this man imprisoned with an unpleasant guard as his only company – decisions they explain as necessary evils for avoiding contaminating the man with human interaction before the experiments about altruism are complete. However, she does nothing to go against her father until the day when she and her kid brother, Sam, meet Ontario Man and his handler. Seeing the spark of intelligence in his eyes, Sydney agrees to help Dr. Winter and Charles in their experiments in order to get closer to their subject. As she and the man grow closer, the man reveals that not only can he speak and understand, he can read, since he had learned to do so before he was lost.

Ontario Man’s name is Michael MacNeil. He had spent the last twenty years both in the company of animals and in the company of a book on gentleman’s etiquette. Although he is intelligent and has some sense of how to behave with other people, he is also naïve and childlike in his understanding of the human world.



Since Michael can talk, he is no use to Dr. Winter as a scientific subject, so Sydney convinces her father to let Michael live in the family house until they can find his family. Michael eagerly soaks up information – he reads books, loves playing games with little Sam, who treats him like another older brother, and enjoys going to the big city of Chicago, which happens to be in the midst of an amazing season: the Chicago World’s Fair. Sam is a natural companion for Michael, who starts the novel having experienced as much of the human world as a young boy would have.

Still, Michael is a grown man – one who is handsome, strong, and filled with definite ideas about love and romance. He knows that like the wolves who raised him, he would like to mate for life – and from the beginning, he knows that Sydney is the right woman for him. Sydney is also immediately and deeply attracted to Michael. Nevertheless, the course of true love never did run smooth, so Michael has several encounters arising from his confusion and lack of guile, while Sydney must fend off the unwanted attentions of another man. In one instance, the family maid is interested in the young man, boldly and aggressively flirting with him in a way he doesn’t understand until her interest becomes unmistakable. In another event, Sydney’s brother Philip takes Michael to a brothel, promising him a “show” – but when the prostitute explains what they are actually there to do, Michael flees because he has an innate understanding of the difference between "having sex" and "making love.” Sydney, meanwhile, is under pressure to accept the marriage proposals of Dr. Winter’s assistant Charles and has to figure out a way to let him and her family down gently.

The family decides to introduce Michael to a zoo, thinking that this might be a good way for him to reminisce about his days in the forest. However, as we read the detailed and period-appropriate description of the horrific way that zoo animals were kept in the late 1800s, we can’t help but root for Michael when he freaks out. He comes back the following night, having decided to release every animal in the zoo from captivity; the freed animals send the whole city into chaos. Sydney protects Michael as police search for him.



The novel ends when Michael’s family is found, and he is discovered to be the lost long son of a late aristocrat. Not only is Michael an excellent marriage prospect for Sydney by birth, but he has inherited his father’s wealth as well – a happy ending for the deeply in love pair.